E. Lee Skjon, 2000: “Outlands & Lovers, Appetite & Loss”
Outlands & Appetite
- everyone was everything to me
- cardholder’s credit
- the bodies are piling up
- minimum tandards of beauty
- but was it an accident?
- at four in the morning
- postcards home
- double blind
- sinless
- new union
Lovers & Loss
- too
- starting to start
- let’s play house
- turning blue
- you were new york
- the natural history of some shoes
- second guesses
- fading days
- this must be
- incomplete
Melody Q. Avery: vocals & tambourine
Roland Arraitte: drums & percussion
Skip Lessens: piano & organ
Cynthia Syzer: strings
Don Shabby: guitars
Baden Toneishen: basses
Some of these songs were written as early as 1996, on my trip to Brazil, while waiting to begin graduate school. Others were written just before they were recorded in the summer of 2000. The album is essentially a double album treating two separate themes, 10 songs apiece. The first ten songs, Outlands & Appetite, are impressions of foreign places I’ve visited and the various kinds of appetite one finds there. It’s not meant to be autobiographical, although I frequently adopt the first-person for narrative convenience. The second ten songs, Lovers & Loss, chronicle the inception of a romance and my attempts to accept its eventual break-up. On this album I tried to imagine a real band playing with fairly consistent instrumentation, and so the arrangements are a little less cluttered than on the previous two solo efforts. I consider these songs in particular as mock-ups for recording with a real band. Of course, that will never happen. I did have one other real person play though; the late Dave Herr played high-hat on cut 9, cymbals on cut 11, and snare drum on cut 15.